School Paper

So I did my research on my paper, and I want to work on getting those notes down on paper.

Feminism-
The biggest part of these theories is that women are opressed and that it focuses so much on women in literature that it flips the expectations and then causes that men become the opressed, neglected minority. With only focusing on women and the role of women, they no longer are looking at the full picture of the book, they are focusing on only half of it.
The next problem is their obsession with the history and the old forms of society. It's one of those things that they're so focused on just how men were oppressive decades, if not centuries ago, and that works well in the books that were written in those time periods, however now in the advanced world, it doesn't stick. You can't claim that women are oppressed to be stay at home mothers, passive citizens that have no voice, when women are powerful forces within the common community. They are politicians, business women, CEO's, accountants, news anchors, and whatever else they want to be. The historical accounts might be able to be treated in the light of unfairness and the light of oppression, but they can not be considered to work with more contemporary works.
The same goes with the extreme circumstances of opposite cultures. They worry about the people that live in oppressive countries and societies, but they take little into account of matriarchal societies, or the contemporary society striving for equality between genders.


What I'm planning to do for this half is show within the text of The Turn of the Screw, how these feminist ideals could be considered fact, that they could be applied, but then show the negation of those facts. If there is focus on women being treated as property, what about the men? Are they being treated as property as well? It's basically showing the arguments within feminism in the text, and then showing the holes within their arguments.



The next section will be dealing with queer theory as well as gender studies. These, in short, again talk about the oppression of one social group, and the misunderstanding of that group within literature. Again, two problems arise. The first being the negation of people outside of that group. If a story does not involve someone that is not heterosexual, they disregard the story, or at extreme cirucmstances analyse the story for it's lack of diversity. Also, there is a stress of oppression and lack of rights. While this could be argued for the past few decades, with the increase of gay rights and laws supporting and allowing alternate lifestyles, the argument doesn't hold much water for the current generation. Again, it will be shown that there are options to view the text under these theories, and that the text could, under the right light, be seen to support these theories, but that there are holes within those theories and their interpretations.

The big wrap up will be this-  historically speaking, there has been opression and there has been unfair treatment of different groups of people. However, in a contemporary setting, in a contemporary world, the analysis that a person acts a certain way because of their biological gender, the gender they identify with, or who they are sexually attracted to does not work. The relationship between action and who a person is, or isn't sleeping with, does not exist. A woman can be aggressive and 'masculine' just as much as a man can be passive and 'feminine'. In the past there were stereotypes and there were expectations for genders, but now, there is much more mobility and liberties in modern societies. Feminism, queer theory, and gender studies, might be able to analyze older texts, however in contemporary texts any theorist that tries to create ties between emotions or actions based on the gender or sexual preference of a character will not be able to create those ties. Society is no longer forcing women to be passive, it is no longer forcing men to be masculine, the evolution of our culture needs to be reflected in the evolution of literary theories.